The British Poultry Council today commented on the content of ‘Chickens, Hugh and Tesco too’ ahead of its transmission on Channel 4 on Monday 26th January.

We and our members have worked with Hugh Fearnley Whittingstall and his TV company during the last two years and it’s been interesting to see his level of familiarity and understanding develop to the extent that he has moved away from advocating only organic and free range farming to supporting Freedom Food indoor chicken production.

In the year preceding this ‘round up’ programme we have seen spikes in demand for free range and growth in the differentiation of indoor systems. As predicted these changes came back into the gradually increasing trend we were seeing before the Chicken Out campaign. We would expect to see this trend continue into 2009 in some of these categories.

It must be recognised however that the Freedom Food scheme effectively rests on top of the comprehensive Assured Chicken Production (Red Tractor) standards, where product labelled with the Freedom Food logo is also required to be underpinned by ACP standards first and by the retailers.

The majority of chicken consumed in the UK continues to come from flocks certified under Assured Chicken Production (Red Tractor). British chicken is produced to a set of rigorous and transparent health and welfare standards under the ACP scheme, and these are independently monitored from farm to pack.

In looking beyond Hugh’s campaign, we’re focused on the future introduction of the EU chicken welfare directive. In addition to raising standards across Europe in line with ACP, the directive will focus not just on welfare inputs, i.e. housing, stocking density etc, but on welfare outputs measured at slaughter which will allow us to accurately assess the welfare of the whole national flock.

-ENDS-

Notes-to-editors:

• The British Poultry Council is the leading representative organization for companies and individuals engaged in breeding, hatching, rearing and processing chickens, turkeys, ducks and geese to produce poultry meat.

BPC 22/01/2009